The story of West Baltimore can be told through life at one intersection
BALTIMORE — By 5:45 that evening, April 27, the mob at North Avenue and Smallwood Street had swelled to maybe 200 young rioters, and the ransacking of Hyo Yol Choi’s 3,000-square-foot beauty products outlet was in full frenzy.
Some of the teenagers had shattered one of Beauty Fair’s windows. Then they pulled like oarsmen on the black iron bars behind the broken glass until the metal bent, opening a gap just wide enough for a skinny kid to wiggle through. The kid unlocked a delivery door from inside, and the looters swarmed past him, plundering and trashing Choi’s six-year-old store “the way locusts come down on the fields,” as a witness put it.
Said another: “They just ran in there. . . . At that one time, probably about 20, I guess. Over the course of two or three hours, probably 150 or more.” Beauty Fair had closed early, at 3:30 p.m., as a city in crisis braced for violence. Now its burglar alarm wailed. “They were carrying out boxes and boxes of merchandise. Armfuls of stuff. They had trash bags filled with merchandise. Somebody had a handcart filled. Somebody had a big trash can on wheels, rolling it out.”
As Baltimore tallies its damage — monetary, social and psychic — from a night of widespread fiery mayhem following the fatal injury of Freddie Gray in police custody, the immense toll of the unrest, and its root causes, are distilled on the four corners of North and Smallwood, in the distressed Easterwood neighborhood. In a city paying a price for generational poverty and hopelessness, it’s an intersection where the problems and consequences are plain to see.
On the southwest corner, there’s Fireside North Lounge & Liquor Store, the premises gutted by arson and condemned last month, its owner, John Han Chae, recuperating from facial fractures and wondering what he did to incur such wrath. He was always a good neighbor, he said. He sold packs of Newports to Gray and liked chatting with him.
On the northeast corner, Willie Weathers, proprietor of Dinkins Fine Dry Cleaning & Storage, sat on a bench near his cash register that night and watched Fireside burn, watched the pillaging of Beauty Fair. It was heart-rending, he said. Then some of the looters turned toward him.
“There were a couple of people out there from the neighborhood standing around,” recalled
Weathers, 71, whose family has owned the dry cleaners since 1969. “They told them not to bother my business because it’s a black-owned business, so they went back across the street.”
On the northwest corner, there’s a three-story duplex, abandoned and falling apart. It stands (just barely) for the abject blight and despair in wide swaths of West Baltimore, where whole side streets are ghost blocks of derelict row houses, their stoops crumbling, their doors and windows boarded.
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And on the southeast corner, a middle-aged South Korean immigrant who came to this country 22 years ago — a suburban homeowner now, a husband and father who speaks little English — works seven days week.
What the rioters didn’t steal from Hyo Yol Choi, they destroyed, or tried to.
When it was over, Beauty Fair, in a squat, unattached brick building that Choi leases, was ankle-deep in ruined inventory — in torn-down shelves, racks and counters; in stomped-open bottles, jars and tubes. The marauders took wigs, leaving dozens of bald mannequin heads scattered along the walls. Brushes and mirrors, ribbons and barrettes, costume jewelry and women’s hosiery were strewn from front to back, and the floor was a swamp of bergamot hair oil, argan butter, tea tree oil and leave-in hair mayonnaise.
It was as if a cyclone had descended on Choi’s little corner of the American dream.
A week and a half later, as a gorgeous spring day dawned in Easterwood, the wreckage in Beauty Fair remained untouched, save for plywood over several of the windows.
“Special cleanup day starts today,” said manager Kevin Kim, standing with Choi in a parking lot beside the store. They were commiserating in low tones, with Choi, 51, dragging on a cigarette and staring vacantly at the pavement. He was waiting for his two other employees, both Kenyan immigrants, to arrive. Asked what his reaction was when he first saw the devastation inside, on the morning after the looting, Choi spoke just above a whisper, and Kim, 45, translated from Korean.
“Mister Choi says, too much shock, too much shock.”
Soon, his emigre Kenyan workers pulled up in a sedan. After getting by with no pay since the rioting, Peter Lions, 30, and Pauline Martin, 41, were going back on the clock this morning, making $8.50 an hour. Choi led them across the lot and into Beauty Fair. He handed out canvas gloves, and plastic gloves for underneath; he fetched bottles of Windex and rolls of paper towels. And they commenced special cleanup day.
Kings of the corner
Just before noon, Lawrence Richards, 53, a longtime sidewalk denizen and one-man welcoming committee at North and Smallwood, rapped on the glass of Beauty Fair’s locked front door.
Despite a language barrier, Richards and Choi have gotten along nicely with each other for years, and Richards wanted to welcome him back, nine days after the rioting. He wanted to offer his sympathies. But Kevin Kim, opening the door a crack, said his boss wasn’t up for any neighborhood greetings.
“Too much shock.”
“Well,” said Richards, “you tell him, if there’s anything —”
“Yes, yes, okay. ...”
“You tell him, Lawrence will be here.”
“Okay, okay.”
Afterward, passing time in front of the store with his buddy Tom Shade, Richards leaned heavily against a railing. “The man kind of hurt my feelings,” he said, “because I just wanted to check in on him, you know?” Then his eyes teared up. “I just wanted to shake his hand, tell him it’s all going to be good.”
Richards and Shade are on-call employees of Willie Weathers, the dry cleaner across the street. Weathers, who owns a half-dozen rental properties, helped the two men conquer personal demons years ago, and now he hires them for errands and fix-it work.
Like Richards, Shade is a man-about-the-block, always out and around somewhere at North and Smallwood. Discussing the economic plight of his Easterwood neighborhood, he said: “Everybody would like some money. I mean, I’m always struggling to make money. Here I am, 50 years old. I should be thinking about being retired.”
He said: “My mother raised five kids by herself. So struggling is all I know.”
The stress of poverty is hard enough to bear without also having to put up with hyper-aggressive law enforcement tactics when you’ve done nothing wrong, Shade said.
He was sounding agitated now, saying that people in cushy neighborhoods never witness the kinds of abuses of authority that he sees regularly on the streets, so they tend to doubt it actually happens.
“The government knows it’s police brutality out here,” Shade said.
“I walk up and down this street, I get harassed,” Shade said. “I had the police throw me on the ground, put his boot down on my neck. Then the other cop comes around, says that’s not him. But they tell me, ‘Stay down!’ That’s how they act.”
Police chased Gray on April 12 because he “made eye contact” with an officer on a West Baltimore street, then ran. State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby later said that Gray, who was 25, committed no crime and was arrested illegally. He was transported in shackles in a police van, allegedly without being seat belted, in violation of police policy. And after he suffered a severe spinal injury during the ride, Mosby said, officers disregarded his pleas for medical help until it was too late. He died April 19 in a hospital.
Six officers, three of them African American, were charged with felonies in the case, including the van driver, who is accused of second-degree murder.
With Baltimore the latest focal point of nationwide concern over heavy-handed police conduct, particularly in poor communities, rioters burned vehicles, set fire to about 15 buildings and ransacked 200-plus businesses, many of them mom-and-pop storefronts.
“I feel as though they were trying to show a point about their lives,” Richards said of the young perpetrators. He wasn’t excusing what happened, nor was Shade. They were talking about intractable misery, about the need for better schools and more jobs, about young people believing that they can have worthwhile futures. “Somebody’s got to show these kids that they’re loved,” Richards said.
“Somebody’s got to reach out to them.”
He said he’d talk with Choi about that, if he could.
Shade told him not to worry. He said Choi just needed some time.
“He’s under a lot of stress,” Shade said. “The man’s out of work. You know how that is.”
Cleanup begins
Maneuvering as best he could in the shambles of his store (walking around wasn’t easy, given the epic scale of the mess), Choi stepped wearily from aisle to aisle, taking in the ruins with a thousand-yard stare.
Following beside him, manager Kim listened and nodded as Choi, his voice barely audible, went on at length in Korean.
Kim said: “He’s so upset, you know, because he’s working many years, from the bottom. Kind of a little step, step, step — work, work, work. And then, open the business like this. And then, one night, all gone. That’s his concern.”
In aisle 6 A-B, the Kenyan immigrants, Lions and Martin, were squatting on buckets and bending to the slimy floor, picking up vessels of curling gel and hair mayonnaise and whatnot, examining the containers one by one for damage, tossing some into trash bags and Windexing those that weren’t broken. Choi’s insurance company had told him that he should figure out how much of his inventory was salvageable. Lions and Martin were handling phase one of that project.
If the owner had done any mental math on his losses, he wasn’t sharing it. And he wasn’t sure when Beauty Fair would reopen. It was clear from the pace of the Windexing that several additional special cleanup days would be needed.
Choi paced and sighed, and Kim said: “Korea, you know, we got a lot of democratic demonstrations. Maybe you saw the TV. Things like fire bottles, throwing it at the police officers right there. Throwing rocks. Throwing sticks. But they don’t loot any store. They’re not bothering any other people. They’re just against the police.”
Speaking for himself, Kim added: “I don’t understand what they’re doing. I mean, I’m not born here, whatever. But why do they break into the commercial place? We are a different race also. We’re not related to whatever happened to the guy dying.”
In Seoul, before Choi emigrated in 1993, he worked in women’s fashion design. But he couldn’t find a job in his field in the United States, he said, because fashion tastes are different here than in South Korea. Instead, he labored for years in the service industry, all the while putting money aside so that someday he could open a store.
He has two siblings who settled in Maryland before him. One owns a deli near the District. The other, a brother, runs a beauty products outlet in a safer part of Baltimore than Easterwood. In 2009, with nearly all of his savings and a lot of help from the siblings, Choi leased this building on the southeast corner of a forlorn intersection, stocked his wares and hung his sign: Beauty Fair.
“He says this neighborhood is very, very okay,” Kim said. “Not much young people. So all the people, no problems. So six years, everything is good.”
The idea was to profit from the customer base in a down-and-out community shunned by major retailers. Countless small merchants in impoverished areas of big cities, primarily immigrants, follow the same business model. In Baltimore last month, those types of largely mom-and-pop operations — liquor stores, carryouts, corner groceries, many owned by Korean Americans — bore the brunt of the riot damage.
‘Violation of humanity’
At Fireside North Lounge & Liquor Store, across North Smallwood from Beauty Fair, John Han Chae, 46, was bludgeoned with pipes and tire irons and left semiconscious on the sidewalk while his nine-year-old business was looted and set ablaze. “Such a violation of humanity,” he would say later from his home in Ellicott City, Md. “They’re black; I’m Asian. That’s the thing I was thinking about. Would they be doing this if I was black?”
As for Choi, after living in apartments for nearly two decades while he saved to start his business and get it up and running, he and his South Korean-born wife bought a half-million-dollar house in Columbia, Md., in 2012. Their only child, Phillip, born in the United States, is a classically American suburban middle-schooler, growing up 20 miles and a world away from North and Smallwood.
As Choi looked on, metal worker Clive Owen inspected the bowed-open window bars on the North Smallwood side of the store. The bars are set four inches apart. Holding a tape measure to the two bent bars, Owen muttered: “Eight inches. . . . Must have sent a baby through here.” Choi stared at the bars, saying nothing. Out front, all day, well-wishers knocked. But Choi wouldn’t speak with them, and Kim wouldn’t let them in. “Usually he’d be smiling and laughing with everybody,” Tom Shade said when he and Lawrence Richards stopped by.
Later, the two men ambled away on the sidewalk, figuring they should give Choi some time.
In the store, Kim said: “He doesn’t have any bad feelings about the neighborhood. This is his own problem. He feels very bad right now. Too much shock. So he don’t want to talk, because he can’t be like he used to.”
Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
